Cross (association football)

In association football, a cross is a medium- to-long-range pass from a wide area of the pitch towards the centre of the field near the opponent's goal.

Specifically, the intention of a cross is to directly bring the ball into the box from an angle that allows the attacking forwards to more easily aim for goal with their head or feet.

Normally, this type of cross is implemented when the team has tall players who can win the aerial battle, or when the crosser is near the targeted team-mate, where curving the ball may be impractical.

Typical tactics may involve pacy wingers capable of cutting in and outrunning the defence, with the intention of delivering accurate crosses into the box from the goal line.

However, by virtue of it being a medium-to-long-range pass into a (frequently) heavily defended area, crosses can be erratic and can result in loss of possession.

Since the emergence of statistical analysis and strategic ideas like possession-based football and attacking fullbacks, crossing as a tactic has been slowly superseded,[1] with questions on its inefficiency of possession and waning chance conversion ratio at the highest level.

While still used occasionally at the highest level,[2] tactics relying on crossing as a "Plan A" tend to be described as "boring" (see Long ball), "naive" or "primitive"[3] (and are contrasted with intricate passing and dribbling technique).

In modern football, there currently appear to be fewer players who are adept at crossing the ball as, unlike "traditional wingers", "modern wingers", such as Alexis Sánchez, Lorenzo Insigne or Eden Hazard, tend to play the ball on the ground in order to retain possession, and are typically quick, technically gifted, creative and agile, thus bearing similarities with players who were formerly deployed as supporting strikers or attacking midfielders.

[4] Formations that make use of wingers, such as the 4–3–3 and the 4–2–3–1, now often use "inverted wingers" or outside forwards so that players are able to cut into the middle and shoot on goal with their stronger foot, rather than using it predominantly to cross balls into the area for increasingly less-common traditional centre-forwards; when crossing tactics are used, they are usually left to the attacking full-backs or overlapping wing-backs.